AWB News

Mistletoe: Not for Kissing Under

The last house I lived in had oak trees all around the perimeter of the property. When we first bought the property there were three giant oak trees standing in the back part of the acre.

In 2004 Florida experienced very unusual hurricane activity. We had three hurricanes that came across the state within a period of six weeks.

I think that the last time a hurricane had actually crossed the state was something like 40 years prior to that season.

Anyway, that particular hurricane season, we were slammed.

On my property each one of those three hurricanes that crossed Central Florida took down one of our big oak trees.

It really was the saddest thing. Now when you look out over that property, the back acre has no trees in the middle part of it, just around the edges.

It really was a big loss.

The amazing thing was that we did not hear those trees fall. The sound of the hurricane winds was so loud and it was roaring so much that those giant trees fell over without any kind of noise.

We just didn’t hear them. We went out the next day and the trees were flat on the ground. It really was something.

One issue that we had on that property was mistletoe. We finally had to get a tree service company come out and get the mistletoe out of all of our oak trees.

The mistletoe actually killed one of the oak trees. We had heard that that might happen if the mistletoe was left to grow unchecked.

We hired a hydraulic lift ourselves one year and trimmed as much mistletoe out as we could. But it came back. The next year we saw small clumps of it and those clumps got bigger and bigger in the years following.

Finally, we could see that the tree was sickly and dying. When we got the tree service company to come out, they said that it would not help the tree to cut out the mistletoe. It was too far gone and the best thing would be to take it down.

This was partly because mistletoe spreads and the best way to keep the mistletoe from spreading from that tree was to just take the whole thing out.

So we spent a whole bunch of money and had the tree taken down and removed. We also had mistletoe removed from the various other trees on the property.

The company did a good job and it was a relief to have all of the mistletoe out of the trees. I was nervous about our mistletoe spreading to neighbors trees and then having the neighbors be upset with us. That would have sucked.

If we had been able to afford it, I would’ve also had a tree service company lift the bottom branches of the trees. I don’t know if that’s called the floor or what but it’s the level where all the branches are raised to by trimming. That makes such a difference on a property when the trees aren’t left to grow down low to the ground.

Thus endeth the fascinating story of my previous property and its oak trees.